Et s’il revenait un jour,Que faut-il lui dire?—Dites-lui qu’on l’attenditJusqu’à s’en mourir—Et s’il m’interroge encoreSans me reconnaître?—Parlez-lui comme une soeur,Il souffre peutêtre—Et s’il demande où vous êtes,Que faut-il répondre?—Donnez-lui mon anneau d’orSans rien lui répondre.Et s’il veut savoir pourquoiLa salle est déserte?—Montrez-lui la lampe éteinteEt la porte ouverte.Et s’il m’interroge alorsSur la dernière heure?—Dites-lui qui j’ai souriDe peur qu’il ne pleure.
Et s’il revenait un jour,Que faut-il lui dire?—Dites-lui qu’on l’attenditJusqu’à s’en mourir—
Et s’il m’interroge encoreSans me reconnaître?—Parlez-lui comme une soeur,Il souffre peutêtre—
Et s’il demande où vous êtes,Que faut-il répondre?—Donnez-lui mon anneau d’orSans rien lui répondre.
Et s’il veut savoir pourquoiLa salle est déserte?—Montrez-lui la lampe éteinteEt la porte ouverte.
Et s’il m’interroge alorsSur la dernière heure?—Dites-lui qui j’ai souriDe peur qu’il ne pleure.
Felicia, bending over her lapful of books, her elbows on her knees, looked at him, and Geoffrey looked at her.
He would have liked her eyes to turn gently upon him. Her eyes were like deep limpid water; they made him think of a still pool under sunny, autumnal trees. Felicia’s manner towards Maurice during these last days had entirely allayed his anxieties on his friend’s behalf. His newer impressions of her removed her from any conceptions of wild-rose flirtations. Her quiet air, now, of intelligent comradeship defined and limited the unsubstantiality of Maurice’s hopes. But that she smiled upon Maurice, that Maurice pleased her, was evident. And Geoffrey was sorry that he had not pleased her. She would not forget that silent mischance of the day before.
A vision of her father rose; a half-baked person; an absurd person; but he was sorry that the daughter should have seen that he thought him so, for he wanted the daughter to smile at him. He hardlyknew that he wanted it, hardly knew that he was sorry, hardly thought at all as he stood, his hand on the shelf near Felicia’s shoulder, vaguely listening to pathetic words and looking at Felicia’s half-averted profile. He was conscious only of a curious feeling about Felicia, a feeling like the soft stretch into the present of a distant memory, an awakening, dim and touched.
Once when he was a boy, rambling on a summer day in the woods, he had come, rather torn and breathless, through a thicket, upon the sweetest, sunny space, set round with tall, still trees, thick with deep grass and open to the sky. He had flung himself down in the warm grass and lain for long looking up at the far, blue sky with its calm, sailing squadrons of clouds. Something in himself, some quality deep and unrecognized, the quality that made him nearer to his saintly father than to his mother with her worldly energy, had quietly arisen, had seemed to mingle with all the peace and beauty, to draw him to the sky, or to draw all the sky down into his own irradiated and happy heart. He had never forgotten the sunny loneliness; and he had never found the spot again. Felicia made him think of it, of the sweet grass and the still trees and the sky. And when he looked at her he seemed to have struggled through thickets to a sudden, an almost startling peace. But the poem was finished, and she was still looking at Maurice.
“Isn’t that the very heart of love?” Maurice asked.
She paused; she was touched; she did not wish to show how much.
“I should have wanted him to cry,” she said.
“No; I think that if I loved a woman,” Maurice turned the leaves of his book, “I should want her to smile.”
“I don’t believe it. I believe that you would rather she cried dreadfully.”
“You don’t think me capable of these heights of self-abnegation?”
“I was thinking of the heart—as it is. Now, I might have said it all—only, oh! how I should hope that he might be listening at the door!”
The slight tension in Maurice’s voice and look yielded to her swallow-like darts and skimmings; over deep waters perhaps.
“Base girl!” he cried, laughing.
“Base and natural. Isn’t the heart of love the longing to be loved? How could one miss such a chance—even if it meant more suffering for the loved one? Besides, it would be better for him that he should suffer.”
But Maurice persisted, his eyes on his book, “If I were dying, and suffering through her fault, I would rather she were ignorant of it—rather she smiled.”
“But you would rob her then of her right to suffer—of her right to love you more.” Felicia turned her eyes on Geoffrey. “What would you wish? Don’t say that you are as inhumanly noble as Mr. Wynne.”
“I don’t think we can in the least tell what we would wish.”
“So that my selfishness and Mr. Wynne’s magnanimity may both be illusory?”
“You are nearer the truth, I imagine. The poem seems to me rather mawkish,” Geoffrey added.
Felicia, laughing, stood up, handing her books to Maurice. “Papa goes this morning and wants these; I must take them to him. You have cleared the rather foggy atmosphere, Mr. Daunt, though I don’t think the poem mawkish.”
Before Geoffrey, Felicia might smile with reassuring composure, and Maurice seem intent only on the psychology of a love poem; but to both of them there had been deeper meanings, deeper recognitions under the little scene. The sense of tension had strained at both hearts. In Felicia was that more vivid sense of life—of an approaching crisis; in Maurice an open owning to himself that he was desperately in love. More desperately than he had ever been with anybody; and yet—what was he to do about it? He knew that Felicia could bring him nothing, or next to nothing; he himself was frightfully in debt, and unless some book or picture would write or paint itself into astonishing remunerativeness he could see no prospect of independence. Angela was certainly there; odd to realize, and rather humiliating, how, in spite of all his talk against marrying for money she had always been there, a comfortable cushion in his thoughts for anxiety to flop on and find ease. But then he had really been half in love with Angela; the refuge had never been a distasteful one; only some inner impetus wasneeded to make it really alluring; and it was with a new sense of insecurity that he realized that falling desperately in love with Felicia made the refuge impossible—as far as any real comfort in it went. There was an added fear in the thought that a new attitude in Angela might have made the refuge inaccessible.
Angela must feel herself neglected, though neglected only for a flirtation. Such a flirtation would leave their half-friendly, half-sentimental intimacy untouched, leave the path to the refuge clear; but did she guess that it was not a flirtation?—see that it was neither so little nor so much? And might she not, her long patience exhausted, marry somebody else? It was a painful thought. Maurice could hardly see himself without that vision of the cushion to flop on. Robbed of that final refuge, life offered ugly wastes of effort.
He scorned himself as he turned from these thoughts, turned resolutely to both the pain and joy of others. But Maurice could not dwell for long looking at pain. He would not look so far. The mere present was beautiful. If only one could keep it so; there was the difficulty; one couldn’t stand still; time shoved one, however unwilling, along, and at the end of the sunny vista was—pain; the flowers and trees that led to it could only bring a momentary forgetfulness. It would be base to make serious love to Felicia; and would she enhance the present? would she flirt? did he want her to flirt? The Watteau element in Felicia, her colouring andmanner of knotting her hair encouraged these futile surmises as to whether the resemblance would extend to a permission of half-artificial, half-sincere coquetries. If she would be the Dresden shepherdess to his Dresden shepherd for the day or two remaining of their companionship—but he shook off such vagrant fancies with a real pang. Such fancies, after letting her know—she must know—that he would suffer so that she might smile! A deeper note had sounded. It would not in the least satisfy him to be her Dresden shepherd; she would never be his shepherdess; the Watteau resemblance went no further than that superficial frivolity. And the question that underlay all others was the one he had no right seriously to ask: Did she—could she—love him?
HE had no right to ask it, and yet Maurice thought of it persistently and the next morning ushered in a most auspicious comment on such thoughts. He received quite a solid cheque for an article he had recently written—a cheque large enough to buy his boots for a whole year—and Maurice was fastidious about his boots; but not therefore logically large enough to make uncomfortable realities recede, as they did, behind a golden haze. Maurice’s moods easily alternated between golden hazes and black fogs.
Geoffrey went away on that morning—that, too, was the receding of an uncomfortable reality, for Geoffrey seemed to hold him by the shoulders, like a naughty, unreasonable child, and make him look at things he didn’t want to look at. He himself was to go on the next day. There was a familiar element of recklessness in the mood as he practised the violin with Felicia in the sunny, ugly morning-room. He was overstrung and happy, and the music they played, by its sadness, made happiness more blissful.
“I sometimes think,” he said, laying down his violin and leaning his arm on the piano, while Feliciastill sat in her place, “that sadness is the most beautiful thing in life.”
In response to such moods Felicia usually became rather matter-of-fact, as now, when she said, “To look at, to listen to, not to live, perhaps.”
“But we shouldn’t be able to see or hear it if we hadn’t lived it.”
“It only becomes beauty, then, when we’ve outlived it, not while we are in it. People dress up their sorrows so,” said Felicia, turning vaguely the pages of the music before her; “they always remind me of the king in the fairy-tale, who had clothes made of air and thought himself sumptuously apparelled when he was really naked.”
“I believe you are right,” laughed Maurice, “and that it is only when we are happy that we enjoy looking at sadness.”
Felicia, though she smiled, was not feeling happy. She had waked to the realization that this and the next were the last days with Maurice, and there was a pang in the realization. She saw suddenly before her the empty months. To re-enter the old monotony after this flashing week was a prospect sad with a sadness that could not deck itself in illusion. But she did not want Maurice to know that she was sad; indeed, was it life or was it loss that made her so? She could not say.
“And since it’s a happy morning, shall we have some more sadness?” she asked.
“Not quite yet.” Maurice still leaned near her and looked at her. The golden haze was aboutthem; it shut off everything else. She must love him; only that would content him. Why not find out, and let the future take care of itself? It probably would—her father could probably give them something. He would take to portrait-painting in earnest, write a lot of articles—very incoherent thoughts went through his mind as he contemplated Felicia and hesitated.
In the midst of this hesitation—couldhe risk a cramping poverty?—would it be base to find out whether she loved him—to make her love him—with no intention of taking such a risk? Felicia raised grave eyes to him. In their unconsciousness of such craven hesitations they seemed to sweep them from him. The clouded intentness of his blue eyes resolved itself—as if a wind had blown bare the sunny ardour of the sky—into a gaze of frankest adoration. He smiled at her silently, and the smile said, “I love you. You are near me. That is why I am happy.”
But Felicia, feeling only a strange fear, looked away.
“Felicia, dearest Felicia,” said Maurice. He took her hand. “I do so adore you. Tell me that you can love me?”
Was it fear or rapture? She did not know. She confessed;
“I suppose it must be that.”
“You do love me?”
“I suppose I do.”
“Oh!—darling!” he exclaimed. He put his arms around her, and, while she still kept her look ofalmost frightened gravity, he kissed at last his Dresden shepherdess.
It was altogether like anEmbarquement pour Cythère, Maurice thought, with the one little corner of his mind that could still see enhancing similes. They were setting sail in the golden haze—what need to ask where bound—to something happy it must be. And, flushed like a wild-rose from his kiss, Felicia felt, too, that swift sailing away into a sunny mist, felt, like the soft speeding through shining waves, relief at the leaving of hostile shores, delightful ease, the soothing of the ruffled frightened heart, afraid of life and of its own loneliness. Life, then, was good, since he loved her. The deliciousness of being loved, after that first shock of wonder—that slipping from the shore to the unknown sea, sang through her like the sea about a prow. Her new trust in life was like a wind bearing her on; with sails all set she went to meet its meaning.
“I almost felt that you loved me—I did not really guess it—but I felt, though it seemed so strange,” she said. She drew away from him a little—her hands folded on his breast—so that she might look at him.
“From the first moment I saw you; from the moment you came round that turning in the lane. You can’t claim any such pedigree of feeling!” He put his hands over hers. Their looks were deep, under the light smiles and the lightness of their words.
“I can see no other beginning—unless just now is one.”
“You did not know—not one bit—until just now.”
“Can one fall in love so suddenly?” she wondered.
“Yes, if one has been feeling love near one for so long.”
“And you really—really knew?”
“From the meeting in the lane. Something inside me said: Here—here at last she is. There was a bird singing near us—do you remember, darling? The bird seemed to say it, too. I was like an awakened Siegfried.”
“Oh—dear Maurice, it is too beautiful,” said Felicia, almost sighing. “Is this my empty life suddenly brimming over?”
She rose, leaving her hand in his, and they walked up and down the long room.
“Do you know you are the only person who has ever loved me?” she said. “Does that make me seem of less value?”
Maurice laughed his joyous laugh. “It only makes me seem of more; it is mymétier, that—to find, to recognize, to love rare and precious things. Who that has ever known youcouldhave loved you, pray? Who could even have recognized you? But, dearest, that is my only value, that seeing it in others.”
The gravity, the wondering sweetness of her eyes were lifting him above even the joyous mood. He paused in their walk, looking back at her with a gravity almost sad.
“Idealize me, always idealize me, and I shall perhaps grow into some real value myself—for the reality now is so thin, so weak, so unstable. Something in you almost frightens me, Felicia.” And as he spoke she saw in his eyes a strange and sudden darkness.
“Something in me!” The appeal was too near and dear. It was she, now, who put her arms about him, who kissed him, bending his forehead down to her lips, saying, “Nothing in me shall ever frighten you. You will come to me to lose your fears.”
It was then that the wonder left her; then, in that moment of sudden appeal and her response to it, that she felt her own love as more than the taking of joy, and understood that in him was some deep need of her, and in herself the power to answer it.
Later on they were able in their happiness to laugh over the ridiculous suddenness of it all. Only a week! To fall in love in one week! What could they know of one another? Felicia teasingly asked him.
“What indeed!” Maurice retorted. They knew everything was the assurance underlying these playful scepticisms. And Felicia also asked—
“You never did care for Lady Angela?”
“Never—never—never!” said Maurice. In the light of his love for Felicia, casting all past fancies into shadow, the words were sincere. Not so sincere, but that could not be helped, was his answer to the next question—
“Nor she for you—not really, I hope?”
“Not really; not a scrap, really. She wants disciples, not lovers.”
Angela, watching them, her wan smile unchanged, through the last two days—the days of the happy secret—wondered, a poignancy in the wonder, if this were not less but more than a flirtation. A hateful supposition, hateful too the thought that it was upon Maurice’s common-sense only that she could count. She asked Felicia in the afternoon to walk with her about the garden, and she played her part with an exaltation that made it almost a reality to Felicia as well as to herself. She would love this girl who was rending her heart, and she would win her love. Once or twice a sad little commentary on Maurice slipped out—the emotionalism that made his moods independable, his purely aesthetic standards. Such comments were quite sincere. These characteristics in Maurice had often troubled her; she only hoped to lift this hard little girl who had enchanted him to a higher point of view than that of mere conquest—to see the responsibilities that followed it, to intimate, as it was only kind to do, that such conquest could not well be permanent. The bitter, unrecognized thought was that it might be Felicia who was entrapped, not Maurice. She could talk with magnanimity to an inferior nature, but candour and a pride more stainless than her own humility Angela could not forgive—and did not know she could not. She talked herself, however, into an almost tearful self-contentment, pressed Felicia’s unwilling hand, and told her how glad she was thatthey had met. “I hope it will all bear fruit. I believe that anything real does, you know.” Felicia was left in a state of some perturbation and confusion. She did not trust, but she was almost touched. It was after this talk that she asked Maurice the question about Angela, a question slightly tremulous; she felt that Angela might deserve pity.
Angela went to her room and knelt down before the serene and beautiful head of a Christ that she always carried with her.
“I have lived to my highest!—oh! I have,” she murmured; and at the sound of her own rapt and suffering voice the tears, long repressed, came.
“This agony must lift us both. He is the instrument on which to try my soul. Love must win, and I will win him; and keep him and redeem him; and I will redeem that poor flippant child who is able, just because she is so small, so blind, to blunder so among my heart-strings—to hurt me so.”
The love that swelled her heart at this moment was self-love. She did not know that she hated Felicia.
MAURICE and Felicia walked along the lane where they had first met; she was going home and he to go that evening. It was a farewell walk. On the hill-top, in the garden he was at last to see, they were to say good-bye—good-bye for a little while. Felicia, in her new and blissful confidence, did not even think of asking for how long, it seemed sure to be so short. But Maurice was already asking himself the question, battling creeping doubts with passionate asseverations. And better than passionate asseverations was the meeting of such doubts by holding her more closely in the deep, lonely lane, dispelling shadows from his mind with a kiss. To hold her, to kiss her, was to keep alight a flame of joy within him, a flame that drooped and flickered when those sad thoughts blew over it; and without was sadness too; the fragrance of the white traveller’s-joy in the hedges seemed a sigh; the soft evening, the pale clouded sky, were grey-habited nuns, whispering of the crumbling of earthly hopes.
That Felicia heard no such whispers, no such sighs, her pensive but steadily gazing profile showed. The pensiveness was a dove brooding on a secure peace; her eyes, gazing ahead, had the gravity of a child’s seeing happy visions. He felt a pang of envy. Orwas it ignorance that kept fear from her? Again he turned her face, white flower that it was, to him, bending his lips to hers. Only so he found some of her peace, her serenity.
Felicia, after the kiss, still looked at him. “I would do anything for you—suffer anything,” she said.
“I don’t want you ever to suffer for me.”
“I would almost rather. It would make even deeper roots.”
“And if the suffering were poverty, grinding poverty?—I am very poor, Felicia”—Maurice’s voice hurried, broke a little—“I have nothing.”
“I should like showing you how little I mind. We can both work. I have always thought that I might make something by giving lessons in music—or translating; I am a good linguist.” Her realism was a new aspect of her. Her steadiness, then, had not faced mere visions. But such realism perplexed, almost dismayed him. A laborious union had never entered his mind. Her words conjured up a grey picture of unrelieved effort, a wife striving beside him in obscurity. It hurt him more for her than for himself, though for himself it gave a tremor of shrinking.
“You work, darling! Absurd! Besides, London swarms with music-teachers, with translators. No, no; something will turn up for me. I can put such heaps of irons in the fire. I may suddenly become a popular portrait-painter—charge a thousand apiece for my pictures; two or three a year would keep us going beautifully. Or I may write a book.”
“Papa and I live on as many hundreds!” Felicia ejaculated, in her smile a touch of maternal tolerance for such improbabilities.
In his strong reaction from that grim picture she had so calmly drawn he could laugh at the thought of the little hundreds. Yet that even those base rungs of the ladder were not beneath his feet gave him a chill.
Among the pines, as they began to climb, the wind sighed, and the sun, far below and far away over the grey wastes of evening, made only a sullenly smouldering line of embers on a cloud-barred horizon. They paused to look back at it.
“How one feels the autumn—almost like winter already,” said Felicia, leaning against him. “It is like our music of yesterday morning, isn’t it?—a sadness so beautiful to look at from our happiness.”
But already Maurice’s momentary energy had crumbled. The melancholy of the wind, the sunset, seized him like a presage.
“Oh! Felicia,” he exclaimed, holding her closely, “will you always love me? You are so much stronger than I am.”
“But Maurice—dear—the only strong thing in me is my love for you.”
“No, no; not only that. You are not afraid so easily as I am. And this parting—you can bear it—with such calm!”
There was almost the sob of a reproach in his voice as he leaned his cheek to hers for comfort. The echo—as of an alien knock at the doors of her happiness,went through the peace, the radiance within. Tears sprang to her eyes.
“Why, Maurice!—calm! It’s only that loving you—having you to love me is so great, so wonderful, that even yet I can only feel the thankfulness—the beauty. Don’t you know that when you are gone my life will be only a waiting?” The tremor of pain in her, her trust in him, roused again a flare of his manliness.
“Not for long, dearest. Waiting isn’t a keen enough word for what I shall feel. Longing, longing, until I see you again.”
“Oh! it will be keener than mere waiting with me, too.” She felt dimly that she must not shackle him in the fight he was going to make for her by showing him what pain to her would be in the waiting.
They walked on. As they neared the house Felicia said, in a voice that had regained its quiet, “We must tell papa.”
Again in Maurice was that crumbling. The last embers of intoxication seemed, as she spoke, to die, to leave him looking at ashen realities. He would conquer poverty. Yes; but bind himself and her to face it—as yet menacing and unconquered? That would be to wrong her more deeply than she could understand. She must be free—free before the world; and fidelity to him merely a matter of feeling. And, thinking of freedom, his mind, with a pang of self-scorn, looked back for an ugly moment at the forfeited refuge—at Angela—not yet openly forfeited.
“No, dearest,” he said, flushing in the twilight and feeling that, in spite of its loss of intoxication, his love for her had never been so strong as in its uprising over such thoughts, “Not yet. Let it be our secret. My affairs are in such a mess—I must not go to your father until they are really straightened. I really ought not to have told you until they were straight; but I could not help that. It seemed almost weak-spirited to go without telling you, for such a grubby little reason—a reason that can’t touch us—but that must shut out others. Don’t you think so? Darling, I have not hurt you—already?”
Nothing in the bent, listening profile told him so; the fear came with a sudden glimpse of a craven self, lest she should see it too. But the eyes raised to his held, with a new patience, no new vision of him. Her smile in its grave acceptance of burdens still found joy in the bearing of burdens for their love’s sake. “No; how could it hurt me? I see that you are right. We will keep our secret to ourselves for a little while.” It was now her trust that seemed to him almost as terrible as the dreaded lack of it had been. Cruel, he thought, that mere material circumstance should toss one’s helpless mind like a shuttlecock from one fear to another. But—“Only a very little while,” he said, nerving himself to be what she thought him.
Felicia, pushing open the garden gate, stepped inside; the gate swung to. She held his hand over it.
“So this is the garden. It is exquisite to leaveyou here among all these flowers; to think of you loving me and waiting for me in all this serenity.” He smiled, looking quickly from her to the irises, the pansies, the roses. But the smile faded. “Ah! but how can I wait!—how can I bear to leave you!” His pain, his fear, surged up in the words. He hid his face on her shoulder, longing for a strength that would banish them; her trust in his strength hurt him too much to give it; but when she kissed him fear was soothed. Only—how would it be when she was no longer there to kiss him?
Her hand for a long moment had pressed his head to her breast; then she moved from him, saying, “You will be late for your train, dear Maurice, and I shall be late for my dinner. Papa must be waiting.”
Maurice, to spend this last day with her, was to take an evening train that would get him to London in time to catch the Scotch express. He must go sandwiched but dinnerless. They had laughed over the sacrifice. He had now, again, to laugh, brokenly.
“How can you think of trains?”
“I am thinking most of the train that will bring you back.” Once more her trust struck flame from him. “Ah!—soon! soon!” he said. They kissed silently. He saw the tears in her eyes and adored her for the strength that, for his sake, mastered pain and did not let her fear.
THE wonderful week seemed, as it receded into the past, to gain in wonder, to irradiate the present with ever-deepening meaning. Everything was beautiful; all relations beautified; for the unbeautiful ones she could feel no longer any bitterness. And into the superficial monotony of the old life Maurice’s letters came like chimes of bells breaking the stillness. He wrote constantly, letters of a quite recovered gaiety, giving his impressions of the people, the places he saw, showing her life as he saw it—as she some day should see it, beside him; and through all went the ardour of his homage, his longing.
Felicia, in answering, felt that she could with him be so entirely her whole self that she need not show her whole self; it was easier for her to give him her soul dressed in tender humour, beribboned with quizzical freaks of fancy. It was his understanding of her, his consequent perfect possession, that lifted her life into the new sense of power and freedom, for was it not freedom and power when every faculty was effective, bore fruit in his responsiveness?
Not till late October was the beauty of the new life touched by a breath of doubt or sadness. A dejection, then, showed itself in Maurice’s letters, a dejection that coincided with his return to London after his round of country visits, coincided with histaking stock, as it were, of his situation and looking his powers and resources in the face. The letters then became at once more passionate and more infrequent. He must not sadden his darling, and the analysis of his glooms could only sadden her. He was working—it gave him less time for writing—luckily for her. In her answers Felicia’s courage steadily smiled, held out an unfaltering hand to help him over the morass of melancholy; but the melancholy, more and more, like a fog closing round him, seemed to shut him from her. Her apprehensions from vague became cutting. She did not know a touch of distrust, but the separation, the sadness, hurt too much. “Come and see me; spend a day. We can walk in the woods. It will give you strength and me too,” she wrote.
Maurice only sorrowfully answered, in a letter like the slow rolling of big tears, that he must not; it wouldn’t mean strength, it would mean disablement. He must wait until he had more right to see her. He begged her to love—love—love him. After the glory of golden days and thoughts, of deep, glad breathing in a crystal air, this change was like a labouring breath, and like the change in the year—the grey and amethyst of late autumn. The old loneliness returned again and again, but with a poignant stab that no former loneliness had known. Bereavement seemed to hover near her.
Gathering late roses in the garden one day she faced, for the first time, her own fears—saw that they were fears. She had not heard for a week fromMaurice, and his last letter had been little more than a plaintive sigh of self-pity. For the first time Felicia was asking herself if joy was not to be a distant, a far distant thing. She saw more clearly the forces against him—forces that her young ardour had barely glanced at; she did not distrust his love—that would have been too horrible a wrenching of the new doubled life, but she distrusted his strength before such obstacles.
The roses were fragrant, fragile, white, the outer petals streaked with a hardy red. When she had filled her basket she went to the gate and leaned over it, looking vaguely down the road. The thought of that summer evening was with her, the life there had been in it—deep, sweet life—in the pain, the trust. The facing of a long, blank patience was almost death-like, almost like the shutting of the eyes, a yielding of oneself to the earth, with a faith in final resurrection—where?—when?—who knew?—for all light in a shrouded present. Felicia shook off the simile, with a fear that Maurice’s plaintiveness was infecting her. He had more right to it—burdened fighter. Her love a burden?—again her heart dropped. She bent her face to the roses. Their sweetness went through her like a smile. She sighed, her eyes closed, over the relief of her own gratitude for such smiles. When she looked up again she saw a man’s figure among the pines below. It was only for a moment that her heart could stand still with joyous questioning—joy so keen that it seemed to leave the heart it passed from bleeding; for inanother she saw that it was not Maurice, and then, with a wholesome surprise, the staunching of the wound, that the wayfarer was Geoffrey Daunt. In knee-breeches, shooting-cap and coat, he looked a veritable Apollo straying, incongruously garbed, through a landscape beautiful enough to match him. Felicia, finding still that wholesome staunching in surprise, watched the nearing perfection appreciatively for some time before definitely wondering what brought it there. He himself, as he approached, showed no surprise. His eyes, as he doffed his cap, met hers calmly. He had quite the air of having come to find her and of having expected to find her leaning on the gate and watching him.
Felicia held out her hand. “Are you with Aunt Kate? Have you been shooting? You haven’t lost your way?”
Geoffrey, while she asked these questions, held her hand over the gate and, though as unperturbed as ever, seemed somewhat at a loss for an answer. Dropping her hand, his eyes went from her to the house, the garden and away to the hills.
“You are high up here,” he observed. “No, I haven’t lost my way. I knew this road led past you. Yes, I am with your aunt for the week-end. I have been shooting.”
“It is rather good shooting, I believe. Uncle Cuthbert prides himself on it, I know.”
“Very good,” he answered, with still his vagueness.
“Well, won’t you come in and have some tea?” Felicia suggested, since the pause that followed grew long, and it suddenly occurred to her that however inimical she and Mr. Daunt might be there was yet a lack of even conventional hospitality in this survey of him over a closed gate.
“Thank you,” said Geoffrey, pushing open the gate and coming in, quite as if this, also, were what he had expected. As he walked beside her up the path he made no customary remark on the charms of house and garden—for the garden, with its Michaelmas-daisies and roses was still charming. His lack of aesthetic appreciation she had guessed, and in his quiet glance now was a business-like discrimination, as though he merely recognized a certain oddity and were classifying it. Geoffrey, meanwhile, was not wondering that he had come, for he had definitely intended coming, but was wondering a little what, exactly, he had intended in coming. To see Felicia Merrick. No further object was defined in his definite mind, where objects were clear-cut. He therefore turned from wonder and rested upon the attainment of his object, looking now at Felicia, observing the details of her dress—her blue serge frock, her narrow white lawn collar, the black bow under her chin—observing the curves of her thick hair, the freshness of her cheek—not as an artist would have done, with a keen consciousness of the picture they made, but with a very vivid feeling about their significance to himself. They meant that sense of charm; and, when her eyes were raised to his, there came that sense of sudden peace.
She paused before the door. “Would you like tea now, or shall I show you our view? It’s the proper routine—first view, then tea. There is a wonderful view up there from the top of the hill.”
“You shall show me the view another day,” said Geoffrey.
There quickly darted into her mind a strange query. Had Maurice sent him with some message? She said, summoning a smile, “Very well. And I don’t believe you care much about views, do you?”
“I don’t think I do; not much.”
She ushered him into the little hall. It was panelled in light wood, and its faint woodland fragrance made him think of pagan incense in some primitive temple. There was a leaping fire in the sitting-room, and the white austerity trembled with rose and gold; branches of larch in tall bronze vases glowed like a delicate mist of light. The freshness, the fragrance, the simplicity, all spoke of Felicia. She rang for tea, and, while she filled a bowl with her white roses, could not repress that inner urgency.
“It is long since I saw any of you. How are Lady Angela—Mr. Wynne?”
Her eyes were on the roses; she spoke calmly, feeling hypocritical. Geoffrey, standing near the fire, placidly replied that he had seen very little of them.
Her hypocrisy was successful; he could have surmised nothing. The excitement died, and the lesser question of his meaning there hardly stirredher indifference. He wanted tea; perhaps he even wanted to see her, which was nice of him and very unexpected. A weariness was in her as she joined him at the fire and held out her cold hands to the blaze.
In the little silence the oddity of the situation perhaps struck him too. Felicia, looking up from the fire, saw in his pre-occupied gaze at her some inner cogitation. He hesitated a moment, and then with grave courtesy asked, “Your father is well, I hope?”
“Very well, thank you.” She was still looking at him, and into both minds there flashed the memory of that silent drama at the table, and, seeing that he, too, remembered, Felicia was astonished, really touched, to see the Olympian suddenly flush deeply.
For a moment the dominating young man looked quite helplessly at her, and in this little silence something else passed between them; it refused analysis. Felicia could not have said whether pleasure or compunction were uppermost in her consciousness, she was so sorry for his discomposure, yet so pleased at his capacity for it. At all events enmity was over.
“About your caring for the view,” she said, going to the tea-table and busying herself with the spirit-lamp and kettle; “it doesn’t make you happy to look at beautiful things, does it? You haven’t at all cultivated your senses of seeing or hearing, have you?”
Geoffrey took some moments to bring his mind back to this level. The shock of his own emotion before that memory, his pain that it should be, his desire that it should not count against him with her, were new elements in himself that he contemplated with some bewilderment. “No; I haven’t had time for cultivating my senses,” he said, after the evident adjustment. “I hardly believe that they would be worth cultivating. Does that seem a guilty negligence to you? You are awfully well up in all that sort of thing; I could see it.”
“Indeed, I don’t at all exaggerate the importance of that sort of thing”; she smiled her amusement at the idea of finding his negligence guilty.
“Certainly there are more important things in the world,” Geoffrey answered, also with a smile. “I don’t understand making feelings—however exquisite—the object of life.”
“Nor do I—I hope you see that too.”
“Oh, yes; I see that.” He had evidently seen a good deal, and with the sense of groping for a new interpretation of him, Felicia asked—
“But what do you call the object of life?”
He was prompt, his eye echoing her amusement. “To express oneself actively; to do something; to succeed.”
“The artist may do all that.”
“The artist, yes; not the appreciator—the taster of life.”
“Well, as to doing something—does not thatrather depend on what the something is? It ought to be something for other people, oughtn’t it?”
“You can’t do much for other people unless you have done a great deal for yourself: you are of no use to them unless you have much personal meaning. In doing all you can for yourself you probably do your best for others.”
Facing her beside the fire, he still smiled, but it was no longer the smile that offered a bull’s-eye. He really waited to hear what she would say.
Felicia’s eyes mused upon him for some silent moments; his cheerful conviction exercised a rather dissolving force upon her thoughts. Like sheep before the bark of a genial and business-like sheepdog she saw them scattering. It required an effort to arrest the silly dispersal.
“What wisdom and goodness the self should have that could dare say that,” she found, adding with a laugh for her own vagueness before his certainty, “You seem like an embodiment of the cosmic process!”
The tea was made, and as he sat down near the table, opposite her, Geoffrey remarked: “In its merely phenomenal aspect you mean, I suppose; the cosmic process in any other includes the ethical, you know.”
“Oh—I haven’t called your wisdom and goodness into question.”
She had never before, Geoffrey realized, shown him at once her malice and her kindness. Her smile, at last, was like the smiles at Maurice. He hadthe sense of sunny playfulness—reminiscent of childhood, and the big words they bandied were delightfully rebounding, gaily coloured balls.
“I must seem almost impertinent, I am afraid,” Felicia went on, “but I have to be—to keep up my courage. I never gave tea to a great man before. I suppose that you are a great man—for I can’t say that my littleness has any means of knowing. Impudence is the privilege of littleness, you see.”
“But not satire; that’s the privilege of equality or superiority; you have a perfect right to it. It’s only potentially that I can be called a great man.”
“Why, I see people reading whole columns of you—in theTimes;—what is greatness, pray, if that isn’t?”
“You never read my speeches?”
“Never,” she confessed; “besides, you have only made one or two, you know, since I ever knew any thing about you.”
“Politics don’t interest you?”
“They might, if I came into any real contact with them. To read speeches is to see the flag without knowing what battles are going on under it.”
“Whatdoyou do?” he asked.
“Since I don’t read speeches? Not much, really. I am an embodiment of the dullest thing in nature—inertia. I exist—like the trees outside. Things happen to me; the seasons pass over me; perhaps I have a branch lopped off now and then. I express nothing that I can think of except indolent vegetation.” She really liked him so muchthat she had allowed her voice to gather a bitterness from her undercurrent of thought as she went on. She laughed, though half sighing as she added, “I am matter, you see—and you are motion. It must be nice to be a force.”
“Although you disapprove of the direction this force takes?”
“But I know nothing about its direction!” Felicia protested.
And presently, as from half-jesting their talk grew graver, she realized that the “force” was taking her into its confidence. It was as if he wanted to show her his direction—the battle under the flag. His whole visit had been an enigma; it now almost amazed her. She guessed how little sympathy was a necessity to him, and indeed he made no bid for sympathy. He sketched for her the political situation, his own attitude in it, the figures of his colleagues and their opponents, and calmly unravelled all the rather wilful knots her questions presented. She wondered, as his so unimpulsive frankness grew, whether he felt her at all as an individual, whether she were not, rather, a mere comfortable occasion on which he could take his ease and give himself the unwonted relief of thinking aloud. Whatever her office, she liked the force. He no doubt built with other people’s ideals and intended himself to inhabit the completed palace; yet she liked him. It was already late, and he had been there for almost two hours, when Mr. Merrick came in.
Felicia saw on her father’s face a mingling of amazement and gratification quickly composed into an over-emphatic dignity.
“I liked him ever so much,” said Felicia; when Geoffrey had taken his departure; “he is so different from what I thought.”
Gratification at the testimony to his daughter’s attractiveness warred in Mr. Merrick with the repudiating dignity. He stood firmly on the latter as he answered—
“I don’t care for the type. He does well enough for you to study”; and gratification rose again as he added: “That’s the worth of our position. We stand apart and let others come to us. We discriminate, judge, taste the flavour of life.”
“We certainly do little else!” said Felicia.
“Ah, my dear, what would you? What else for an awakened intelligence is there to do? You wouldn’t have me blindfold myself and rush into the political arena like this youngambitieux?—poor automaton! The fly on the wheel, fancying he drives the coach. We at least know that we are flies, and watch the fated turnings of the wheel with an understanding of our powerlessness.”
Felicia, wondering how he would manage such a rush, only murmured vaguely that she refused to believe herself a fly, and her father, tolerant of an accustomed flippancy, smiled, “Let us be duped by all means, but, as our exquisite Renan says, let us be knowing dupes.” He settled Geoffrey, in the phrase, to his own satisfaction.
WHILE Maurice moved from country house to country house, this migratory season, stretching on until the late autumn, he found it easy to keep his spirits in the golden-haze atmosphere, and his letters to Felicia in harmony with his spirits. The impression Felicia had made was deep enough to carry him through several months at the same pitch of determination, a determination more stable than any he had mustered when in Felicia’s presence; for Felicia made him face facts, and in these pleasant houses where he was appreciated and made much of, he faced only imaginations; it was easy to imagine himself potentially a rich man, when a rich environment put itself at his disposal, and when Felicia was no longer before him to make him feel that because he was not rich he must part from her. It was with a positive sense of injury that he met, when he came back to London, the brute facts. A terrific array of unpaid bills, a disconcerting army of duns, made the difference between actuality and imagination grotesquely apparent. He had to take several very deep steps into further involvements before the present ones were at all relieved, and present relief made a still more menacing future. Economy was certainly the first necessity, and after that work.
Maurice was quite convinced of his own willingnessto dine off a chop when he had no invitation for dinner, yet it seemed far more fitting, when there was gold in his pocket, to think about an essay over a delicate little dinner at a first-rate restaurant. He had never found chops inspiring, and it was, though more costly, particularly inspiring when a friend was asked to share the delicate little dinner with him. He often thought of running down to Trensome Hall to see Felicia, but restrained the impulse with a self-control he could but find very magnanimous. It pained him still to write to her in a tone he felt to be hypocritical, yet he could not bring himself to tell her that all definiteness grew vaguer and vaguer, and that marriage was out of the question, for who knew how long. He would not say so yet, for who knew what might turn up? But what pained him most was to feel that the very pain of not seeing her was losing its poignancy. The impression she had made was deep, but it was being overlaid, effaced to a certain extent by others, for in his crowded life impressions were many. His easy, flexible, smiling nature followed almost inevitably the line of least resistance, and though when he thought of Felicia it was often with pangs of positively disintegrating gloom and self-reproach, he could but associate her, now that realities were before him, with a grey, drudging aspect of life that could certainly bring her no happiness. A hand-to-mouth existence was endurable only when unshared. Far kinder, for the present, to leave her dreaming of him on her lovely hill-top; kinder? It was necessary.
A few small orders momentarily padded the present, but the hard facts of the future were looming with a peculiar menace in the week that Angela came back to London in February.
Lord Glaston and his daughter installed themselves in the Eaton Square house that was part of Angela’s large inheritance from her mother.
Maurice never felt his environment so absolutely adapted to the needs of his taste as in Angela’s house, where nothing made bids for notice, and where the charmed spirit melted into mere acquiescence with surrounding harmony. He and Angela had together created much of the harmony, for the house had come to her frowning with Mid-Victorian rigours. They had sought furniture, pictures and porcelain together, and as he and Angela sat in the boudoir, with its pale eighteenth century tints, its subtly-carved furniture, and the mellow greys of its St. Aubins and Eisens, he felt that after a period of tumult and turmoil he was once more almost at home in an atmosphere all peace and suavity. A glance at the realities that prowled outside made this inner bower the quieter, and he could but remember that he had only to put out his hand to make it part of his life; had had only to put out his hand; he amended the slip loyally, yet lazily, too, as he leaned with Angela over a portfolio of old prints. Angela was at her best; gentle, unemphatic, and also a little lazy; not in her exalted mood that sometimes fatigued and made him satirical. She did not speak at all of Trensome Hall. It might have been a dreamof no importance; it seemed indeed something like a dream to Maurice as he sat there, and a dream in which he had played a foolish and an ugly part—as one sometimes does in dreams.
Angela was at her loveliest. Her delicate face most pleased him when least serious, and now, as her long eyes glanced round at him, the dim gold of her hair almost touched his cheek, he felt that it would be curiously easy to slip an arm around her (her tea-gown, too, was perfect, seemed to invite encircling)—kiss her and say “Let this go on.” Of course he would not do it; Maurice wrinkled his brows a little as he looked at the print she held up.
“Do you know,” said Angela, again glancing at him, and seeing that he was not thinking of the print, “I have a plan, Maurice. You have never painted my portrait. I am going to give you an order. You must paint my portrait. I want you to begin at once.”
“That will be delightful,” said Maurice. From a pecuniary point of view the order indeed was highly welcome; from other points of view not exactly unwelcome, only a little disquieting.
“You must come here to do it,” Angela went on, patting the edges of the prints into place and closing the portfolio. “There is an excellent light in the music-room. I will wear white; I should like whiteness only on the dark of mere distance, an emerging soft and radiant from gloom. I do want you to make a success of it, Maurice; not only for my own sake, but for yours. You know, I think the time hascome for you to strike some decisive blow. You diffuse yourself too much. You must write a great book, or paint a great picture. I want to be the picture,—selfish I!—I want to link myself, you see, with greatness.” She still patted the edges of her prints, speaking with candid sweetness.
Maurice, as was often the case, was half-charmed into taking her at her own valuation, as all candour, all sweetness, and, guessing at the further feelings underlying the frankness, he felt it peculiarly generous. After all, there was something coarse and petty in caution. She claimed nothing; why imply that she did by any reticence on his part? How ugly such a reticence would be!
“Will you inspire the book too? It’s my only chance for greatness,” he asked, smiling.
“Who knows? Perhaps I may.” Her answering smile was even lighter than his own. “But it can’t be consciously. You must find; I can’t give.” She got up and walked to the fire, displaying a back flowing with faultless lines from the sloping shoulders, their fragile, exaggerated grace, to the curve of the long, lace train. Angela was intellectually ensconced in mountain fastnesses, where any appeal not purely spiritual was stonily regarded, but her very beautiful body was as keenly conscious of itself, of its every pose and movement, as that of the crudest coquette. Angela’s coquetry was not crude; it wound itself through her mental attitude as pervasively, but as delicately, as the narrow black ribbons curved through the laces of her dress. It now said, “Lookat me; follow me,” and Maurice, after the startled moment where he surveyed that queer little speech as to his finding and her not giving—was it a very clever, a very courageous, a very pathetic speech?—looked at her, and followed, joined her at the fireplace, and as her hand rested on the mantelpiece he put his, in an impulse he was hardly conscious of, lightly upon it.
Angela said nothing, but she lifted her appealing eyes to him.
“If I could paint you so!” said Maurice, removing his hand and wondering at himself. He did not go further than this, but the things that she might well have expected him to say after it made him uncomfortable.
Angela felt more than discomfort; it was a real anguish of baffled hope. Yet she was almost sure, now, that he would go further.
And by imperceptible degrees, during the mornings that followed in the music-room, he did.
He definitely determined nothing; the facts of life seemed to bear him towards a definition over which his will had no control. There was the past, the golden haze, the sweet golden haze, and sweet Felicia; but the self that had wandered into it with her already seemed illusory. The present self, its crushing necessities, its really tempting escape from them, was too vivid a reality to make memory of much avail.
Felicia had charmed him more deeply than Angela could ever charm; yet, since the self which had sotruly loved her was already dim, unseizable, Angela’s half real, half artificial attraction counted for more than the dear impossible past.
The passionate sadness of the letters he sent to Felicia was sincere, for in writing to her he caught together all his memories, and they pressed on his heart with a great weight of regret. He wrote of hope deferred, of possible hopelessness, feeling courageous, and avoiding the worst pang of all—that dread of playing an ugly part in Felicia’s eyes—that dread of her seeing cowardice instead of courage—by telling himself that finally to renounce her would show the truest love for her. From these crises of almost despair he drifted on to a long silence, a kind silence surely, from which she must draw her own conclusions. She would of course take time in doing so, give him the benefit—poor darling!—of every doubt, and if, at the last moment, anything did turn up he could still claim her and explain the impossibility of writing when there was only despair to write of.
During these weeks of drifting he saw little of Geoffrey, and when they met, Felicia was as unmentioned as though, to both, she had been the slightest, least significant of episodes. With all his confiding tendency, Maurice could not well confide to Geoffrey that the wild-rose flirtation had become a serious love affair, and, in the same breath that the long dallying with Angela was on the verge of becoming serious too. With all his hard common sense Geoffrey might look unpleasantly askance at thistaking on of a new love before the old was off, and until there was no chance at all of the old love being on again, Geoffrey might as well think him still engaged in undecisive dallying. The very fact of long intimacy, of the taking for granted of a closeness that made questionings unnecessary, kept their minds apart.
But on a morning in early March, Maurice, while putting the finishing touches to his portrait of Angela, was facing at once despair and an aching freedom. The day before had unchained at his heels a pack of howling debts; he had run before them to the only refuge; a letter, after a month of silence, that practically set Felicia free. He had wept in writing it, allowing the irrepressible tears to splash upon the paper, bitterly smiling at himself for the craven little consolation he recognized in this testimony to his grief. And, with the half appeal of the tears for pity, was another appeal—a spontaneous clutch at the brightness he must thrust from his life—for her love.
He would not clearly see that in so clinging he set himself—rather than Felicia—free. Heavy gloom had settled upon him, a gloom that filled the letter with dismal sincerity. That it had been sincere he felt to be proved by the fact that no sense of relief had followed its despatch. He was free, but free in a black world, and he felt, as a result, even less drawn to Angela than usual, even more unwilling to accept the now inevitable escape. But with the new sense of freedom was a new sense of recklessness, the sensethat he had, in some untraceable way—(for what could he have done, disasters crowding thick upon him?) made himself only fit for the lower thing; so that, at all events, he might as well make the most of it.
Poor Angela! to be so accepted! The irony of it turned to pity for her as he looked at her sitting there in her white dress, pale, and with an air of deep weariness. She seemed to droop before him as she sat in the keen spring light; to droop, to appeal, and yet to be very proud, ready for resentment almost. Maurice saw all this, and his comprehension gave a touch of real emotion to his pity and to his recklessness. Pity for himself mingled with his pity for her. What a queer mess they were in—poor things!—both of them. His mind, sick with self-analysis, self-scorn and self-defence, lurched, exhausted, on to a longing for her to comfort him, to show him, in loving him, that he was not base, only fatally pursued by life.
When she stepped down from the stand that had been put at the end of the room, she did not, as usual, come to his side to see the progress he had made. She went to the window, her hands clasped behind her, a rigidity in the lines of her slender, half-swathed arms. Maurice painted for a moment, then looked at her, added another touch, stared at his palette, laid it down, and joined her.
She did not turn her head to him, and suddenly he guessed that there were tears in her eyes. His own grew wet again with that mingled pity. Her handfell to her side. He took it in his. Still she did not look at him. She stood waiting, anything but proud, and yet ready in all the humiliation of her helpless avowal, to flash suddenly into scorn and anger. The something of splendour in this attitude gave Maurice the final impetus. He was glad to yield at last to feeling alone, to almost irresistible feeling. It was as though he had stood for long on the shore waiting for the tide, and that its slow rising had culminated in this sudden wave that just lifted him off his feet. Really she was lovely; she was piteous; and she could console him for being forced to take her. His arm went round her; he turned her head gently, saw the tears, and kissed her.
“Oh, Maurice!” her lips breathed under his, “how I love you!”
“And I——“ he stammered. “Angela—it has been—you understood—you are so horribly rich, and I so horribly poor.” He wanted her to console him for the fact that had tarnished everything, and the longing was so great that he grasped at this falsification of all his hesitation. It was rapture to Angela. He was transfigured by the avowal; and her heart, sick for so long with doubt, seemed to expand like a storm-beaten flower in sunlight. She herself was transfigured; saw that the starved, straining self she had known was a lower self, distorted, difficult to read clearly; this happy self was real at last. His arms were around her. She would be noble, beneficent to all the world. All who came near her would be the happier for her happiness.How weak she really was—who so needed love to lean on!
“I understood—I hoped it was that,” she said in a trembling voice.
At a step outside they moved apart, yet not soon enough Maurice felt, but for the significance of the situation to be very obvious to Lord Glaston as he came briskly in.
If Lord Glaston had ever felt dismayed by his daughter’s vagary he had long outworn the feeling. He was an easy-going man, cynical and tolerant; he liked Maurice. Angela could suit herself. He now threw Maurice a bright “Hullo!” hesitated for a moment, and, as nothing was said, he sauntered into the room and looked at the portrait. “Capital, really capital, Wynne,” he asserted. “A little too thin and woe-begone, perhaps.”
Maurice’s mind was revolving like a kaleidoscope; the dominant thought was that he could not yet make it an open engagement. And Angela would understand that they must see one another again before admitting the world to their new knowledge. He longed to escape, to think. He made his farewells, smiled at Angela, and departed.
FELICIA received the letter on that early spring morning, and after the weeks of anguish and humiliating fear felt, with all her despair, the exquisite relief of pity. When he had been so cruelly silent the worst part of her pain had been the seeing of him as cruel—perhaps faithless. Now, as Maurice had hoped, she saw him beaten down, vanquished by fate. She was buried, dead, but in the darkness were no more struggles with nightmares. She read his letter quietly and did not weep, and after her morning duties were done, she went out—walked in her garden, in the woods, back through the garden to the road that led downwards among the pines. It was easier, as she walked mechanically in the fresh, chill, radiant day to grow one with her hopelessness, to accept the fact that the coffin-lid was really screwed down; easier to accept and not to think. She was afraid of sitting still alone.
Her head bent, her eyes followed the line of young grass that bordered the little footpath. Above, the pine branches still sparkled with moisture, and a tiny stream, a braided radiance ran singing a clear, shrill note beside her. Her life would go on, creeping in its narrow limits, like the footpath, with its borderingof green, no doubt; she could not see it yet, but it would grow. The sanity of the simile, after that screwing down of the coffin-lid on dead hope, was part of its bitterness. A sorrow like this would kill all great hope, cripple one, yet leave a capacity for trivial, monotonous alleviations that meant nothing. Yet as she told herself that she must try to see the ironic and sane aspect of the case, the fact of the grass border, the fact that tragedy would not keep its tragic demeanour, must try to see even the deeper sanity of the fact that the daily fulfilling of duty might come to sing a song like that of the thread-like brook beside the path, her eyes were filling at last with tears, and they were slowly rolling down her cheeks as she looked up to find Geoffrey Daunt confronting her.
Geoffrey was as unexpected, as handsome, and, apparently, as composed as ever. Three former visits had given to the unexpected a certain happy familiarity. She had been glad to see him, and although, as she looked at him through tears, she could not say that she was glad to see him now, there was relief in the sight, almost comfort in the sense of momentary escape from the crushing weight of full realization.
She was too well sunken in sorrow to feel minor embarrassments, and while she held out her hand she wiped away her tears with no explanatory word or look.
“How nice to see you. Are you again at Aunt Kate’s?” she asked.
Geoffrey, with an openness neither inquisitive nor indifferent, watched her dry her tears. She felt that he would have wiped away his own with as quiet a candour—imagine Geoffrey Daunt in tears!—and have taken it for granted that no one would ask questions. She could count upon his reticence. Already there were bonds of understanding between them.
He hesitated, however, for a moment before saying, “No; I came down to see you. Have you time for me?—time for a walk, I mean?”
She said that she had come out for a walk, and that he could have all the time he wanted, wondering if her changed looks struck him too forcibly. She knew that during these past weeks she had come to look very ghostly. Perhaps his way of turning his eyes from her now was part of the reticence.
“Where is the view you spoke of when I first came?” he asked. “You have never showed it to me yet.”
She answered, “I am glad that you remember that there is a view. We can reach it more quickly by going through the pine woods.”
They entered the grave, scented silences.
Geoffrey had not seen her for a month, and, more than she could have guessed, he found her changed. It had been with a conscious steadying of his countenance that he met her tear-filled eyes, and now, as with bent head she walked beside him, he looked at her fragile profile.
She was horribly changed, and her smile hadshocked him more than her tears; it had the alien sweetness of death. What sudden sorrow had come into her life? What had happened to her? The new wonder mingled with the old one, the wonder that had been with him for months and that now knew itself.
The longing to help her grief and to speak his own new knowledge was like a cry in him, but he did not speak as they walked upward through the solemn aisles. He felt as if he and Felicia, she with her sorrow, he with his wonderful knowledge, were walking in some sublime cathedral where in their mutual ignorance they were yet secretly near each other. In his hard, strong heart was a trembling sense of consecration.
Suddenly, from the dimness, they were out upon the open hill-top. Pale sunshine, an azure sky, swept them around. They were high above all the surrounding country. Beneath them were the blue-black pine-woods, slopes of pale dun and green, the shadow and sunlight of hill and valley, and all the delicate tracery of tree and earth still unveiled. Among the vague purples of the lower woods the roads ran like white ribbons. Here on the hill-top the wind blew steadily, sadly, in spite of all the gold and azure. Felicia’s long black scarf fluttered against it, and she put her hand to her hat, standing looking away to the horizon, a slender silhouette of black, almost forgetting her companion, conscious only of her aching bereavement. She turned at last to Geoffrey, and found from the almost dreamyintentness of his gaze that he had been as absorbed in her as she in her own sad consciousness.
“How ill you look,” he said.
“I have been rather fagged this winter; sad; some branches have been lopped off; do you remember?” She did not want to talk with any nearness of her sadness; to speak of it, except at arm’s length, would bring her to the verge of tears. She owned to it frankly, yet with a lightness that went like a bird, luring him from the nest where sadness was hidden; but, unfalteringly, with no reticence now, he went toward it.
“Do you know that I care, deeply, that you should be sad?”
“I know how kind you are,” she said, feeling herself at a loss before the difference in voice and look. “So much kinder,” she urged herself on to say, grasping at her old rallying attitude, “than I had ever suspected you of being. Do you know, I didn’t imagine when I first met you that you were very kind. But don’t bother about my sadness. It’s of no importance.”
Under his eyes her lightness was lamentably out of tune. She paused with the sense of graceless discord.
“You don’t at all know why I have come to-day, do you?” he said. A tremor was in his voice, his look; the tremor, not of weakness, but of intense strength nerving itself. His beautiful face against the clear spring sky was white. He was not appealing; she felt in a moment that he would neverappeal; but all the Olympian had suddenly become human and humanly shaken in its strength.
In a flash of deep astonishment she knew why he had come, and in her startled, gazing eyes he read her recognition.
“You see—you see—what I have come to ask. Wait—don’t answer. I don’t want to ask you anything yet. I want to tell you that you have changed all my life. I don’t mean that I care less about the things I have cared for. I care more, only differently.
“From the first, I felt you, hardly knowing what it was; you made me feel things I had hardly believed in. I came back to you, hardly knowing why I came, and then knowing that I loved you. Wait; let me say all this: it’s like breathing after stifling to tell you. Yes, it’s like light and air; you mean that to me. If you were my wife I could make life great—for you—with you. It would be a new world with you beside me. Wait, don’t speak—I see that I hurt you. You don’t care about me—yet. Unless there is somebody else, you shall care. But I want you to see, and believe that whether you love me or not, I shall always be there. As long as I live I shall be there. You must always call upon me. You must always trust me.”
He had spoken quickly, yet with a steadiness that had pushed aside the protests of her wonder, her gratitude, her pain. And even in the pause where he drew the long breath of his full avowal, his eyes on hers held her to silence.
“Now, will you tell me where I stand with you?” he said.
“What can I say,” she faltered. “You are so beautiful to me; I see it all—I believe it all. I can only hurt you.”
His question flashed upon her faltering. “There is some one else?”
“I love some one else.”
Geoffrey did not speak, and a deep flush went over his face.
He had been prepared, she saw, for long and patient fighting; not for this abrupt defeat.
“What can I say?” she repeated. Tears sprang to her eyes. His suffering struck like a blow on her own suffering. Her own heart answered the inarticulate anguish that his must hold.
“Don’t let us say anything,” Geoffrey replied. “Let us walk on a little.”
The longing to comfort him struggled with the cruel necessity for further truth. To speak it now seemed brutal. She was thankful for the respite his silence gave her. They had not gone toward the pines, but down the long, bare slopes to a little wood where the sunlight flickered among young birches and the promise of green breathed through the white and gold.